Reply to comment

I felt present during discussions, whether or not I seemed like I was.  In class, I tended to direct the conversation with questions because that kept the conversation going better than stating my opinion, which is what I tended to do online. Now that I look back, I’m surprised at the conversations my posts started.  Most of my class work was for my own learning purposes, honestly. I contributed to the conversation when I felt like it needed another opinion, and that usually worked out well.  Speaking in class has never been my strong point, but I am working hard to improve that.

My favorite readings were Goblin Market and Persepolis, and Book of Salt and Middlesex to a lesser degree. I did not like Jimmy Corrigan or Lifting Belly because they were difficult to understand. As a reader, my learning edges are at reading things that I do not like and learning from them.  Reading has always been a fun pastime for me, so reading something I do not like seems counterintuitive, but a necessary obstacle to overcome in college.

I tended to write my serendip posts on Friday night or Saturday morning, before other students would post theirs so mine ended up being mostly stand-alone.  I am pleasantly surprised at the responses I got for my post about being gendered in response to our discussion of Middlesex.  For the web postings, I did not put too much effort into them because they are more casual so that the ideas count more than the way I write them.  I usually had an idea in class that I would have liked to discuss, but the conversation would have moved on by then so I would write it down and expand on it in my weekend post.  I put quite a bit of effort into my first web event on the Girl Scouts—it was incredibly stressful for me at that point, but the Feminism in SlutWalk came more naturally to me.  My third web event was decidedly not good. I had an idea in my head and developed it as I wrote, losing any form of organization along the way so that the end result was disappointing.  I am proud of my first two essays, all things considered.  I have learned that planning an essay before writing it, even if I research while I write, is a better writing method than a botched stream-of-consciousness with too much exposition.  Excluding my last essay, I moved quite a ways. My Girl Scouts web event was the first essay I had written in almost a year because I took some time off, and before that my writing was not my best due to other circumstances in my life. I am glad I was able to get back in the saddle afterwards and be able to produce the quality of work that I did.